The first day of a new year is a good time to commit to one's reinvention. That's all one can do, commit. Fully plotting such makeover is ill-advised until a few days lapse... but a steadier income away from the corporate life-suck world is top of my agenda. Spending more time IRL with friends and family is my other "high-priority action item".
That’s it. Yes, I would love to lose weight. To be healthier. Etc. But I’d settle for these two above all else.
I don’t believe in numerology but 2018 added up to 2. 2019 adds up to 3 and 3 is a magic number as De La Soul taught us.
Apologies for the brevity but Happy New Year, you sons and daughters of freedom!
Strikes & Gutters
First item from my Strikes & Gutters List 2018: Nick Cave’s The Red Hand Files newsletter. A simple, powerful concept: submit a question, Nick answers. Resonating with me now is this excerpt from his response to a question about friendship with long-time collaborator Warren Ellis:
In the end, I think Warren and I understand that the longevity of a collaboration depends to a certain extent on the conservation of friendship – friendships need care and constant maintenance – and so we exist as friends beyond the work as well. We go about our work – sometimes together, sometimes apart – and we wish each other happiness, and when one of us is in trouble, the other comes a-running, as the song goes.
Nick nails it. After I lost my job I embarked on a “Friendship Tour”, convinced Facebook is not a suitable substitute for meeting face-to-face. I made it a point to put myself in the presence of those who care for me and for whom I care deeply. I’ll continue to do so in 2019 and welcome any true friends to call or visit.
I’ve had too many friendships die on the vine from lack of “care and constant maintenance”. I sadly accept that I can only do my part. When a friend shows no interest in holding up their end it’s a sure sign the friendship is moribund.
Here are the rest of my Strikes & Gutters for the year:
Call 929-456-2763 during the show or any time to leave a message for play on the air.
The Aerial View Facebook page is here. Send email here.
Hollow Day
On Aerial View I’ve been revealing details of my sordid life for years now. I do it in a pathetically obvious attempt to get you to do the same. You won’t call unless I go first. If I reveal my humanity you’ll reveal yours. You want to empathize because it is empathy that makes us more human. Empathy makes us civil toward each other. Empathy leads us to understanding. Empathy allows us to live through what seems so horrible right now by assuring us that others have been through the same and they are still here.
The simple act of talking with someone who is (hopefully) listening begins the empathy process. Just gritting your teeth and repeating that nugget about “What ever does not kill me makes me stronger” won’t work.
I’ve said all of this because I want to tell you that the next time you’re having a real crappy day, a real hollow day, don’t go through it alone. Tell someone. Then let them tell you about the day they never thought they’d get through. Begin the process of empathy and don’t think you are by yourself.
Here’s a “Hollow Day” story from many years ago…
I the early nineties I was involved with this woman who I should never have gotten involved with. I’ll call her “Laura” (the names in this story have been changed because I can’t bring myself to repeat the actual ones just yet). I know what you’re thinking, that I’m invoking a “hindsight is 20-20” position. But when I say I shouldn’t have gotten involved with her, what I mean is that we were in a band together and I have heard for years that you should never get involved with people you work with, wherever that may be. The other problem is that she initially suggested an affair and we went way beyond that into uncharted waters - and neither of us a Magellan.
We were not far from entering the second year of our relationship and things were rocky like the coast of Maine. We had a new bass player named Harry - our second Harry and our third bass player - in the band and I didn’t like him. Well, actually I hated his fucking guts because he had waited two years for the right moment to enact a bizarre form of revenge. Three years earlier I had developed a crush on a girl Harry the 2nd really liked. Her name was Ophelia and she was the leader of an all-girl band. She was then unattached but she didn’t respond to Harry the 2nd’s ongoing romantic interest – so they set up a strange platonic holding pattern where every so often he would try his luck again and be rebuffed. I knew how he felt about the girl but I asked her out anyway, figuring “all’s fair” and all that bullshit. This made him very mad. His view was that I had marked his territory, “peed on his fire plug” so to speak. But he never told me any of this. He chose to harbor this particular resentment and nourish it like a beloved seed. The “fire plug”, in this case, turned out to be gay. She was too scared to tell me directly but I found out through a mutual friend. I backed out of the picture and figured that was the last I’d hear of it.
Flash forward two or so years later and I’m at Coney Island with my new honey, who was the leader of the band I had joined ten months earlier and very upset at our inability to find a new bass player. Bass player number two had been summarily disposed of after we finished our demo tape. He was a mere lad and not very good and my honey decided – in her sweet, mercenary way – to use him and toss him aside (a motif in her life if ever she had one). Bass player number one, Harry the First, was a legend looming large over the stunted humanity of any bass players who might dare to fill his shoes. He had left the band after his romance with Laura fizzled. My honey always denied this, she says he left the band because his original commitment was to her brother’s band and he was only in her band as a temporary, but I always thought his timing was odd. He left the band just after Laura and I began our involvement. She says they were strictly friends by the time I came along but I always suspected something else was going on between them. She assured me I was just being paranoid.
We’re at the Sideshow bar, talking to Harry the 2nd – the guy who will soon be bass player number three, the same guy who I had (unbeknownst to me) offended gravely years earlier with a fleeting interest in the (gay) object of his longing – and my honey takes me aside at one point and asks why I’m encouraging this guy to join the band when he’s so obviously a flake. I’m championing the guy, saying “Who knows, maybe he’s a great bass player, let’s give him a chance, blah blah blah”. My honey reluctantly agrees to try him out but says she will not make him an official member until she’s completely sold on him.
Three months later she’s still not completely sold on him but they’ve become somewhat chummy. Harry the 2nd always has some acid with him or some pot or some other drugs and I get the distinct feeling he’s sharing it with my honey (he’s certainly not sharing it with me) because her attitude has changed 180 degrees towards him. Now she thinks it’s me being too hard on his talent (or lack of it). They’re hanging out together and not inviting me along. They’re sharing laughs between them and not clueing me in. At this point I looked up the word “cuckold” in the dictionary and realized there should’ve been a picture of me next to the definition.
And then comes the prelude to my hollow day. Laura and I get up early one Saturday and go to a nearby flea market and it’s obvious something is bugging the crap out of her because she’s exceptionally moody and skittish all morning. We spend two hours just walking around looking at other people’s crap and not speaking to each other.
Afterwards, we find ourselves at Roy Rogers – fast-food joints held an inexplicable sway over her – and she engages me in one of the stupidest exchanges I’ve ever had. It begins on an ominous note:
“How come you never told me you liked Ophelia?”
“What do you mean?”
“How come you never told me you like her? You asked her out, didn’t you?”
“Who told you that?”
“Never mind who told me. Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Because it was three years ago. It was before I ever met you. What does it have to do with today?”
“Is that why you’re trying to get her band the rehearsal space next to ours? Do you still like her?”
“What!?! Did Harry tell you this?”
“Don’t worry about who told me. Is it true?”
“Yes, it’s true. But it happened years ago. And she said “No”. And she’s gay. What the hell is your point?”
“My point is that you must still like her or why would you try to get her into the same rehearsal space as us?”
“Look, first it was not Ophelia but Gina who asked me to help them. And I agreed to help Gina because we know each other from the radio station. Second, I haven’t talked to Ophelia in years. Third, SHE’S A FUCKING LESBIAN so if I was going to be interested in anyone besides you why would I choose her?”
And then it dawned on me.That rotten fuck Harry the 2nd, bass player number three, had told her about my long ago interest in Ophelia in a bald-ass attempt to paint me as a scumbag. Laura’s (twisted) line of reasoning was that I had won her over with my sincerity about how she was the only women I’d ever felt so strongly about and now comes evidence that I’d once been attracted to someone else. God forbid. I was imagining how Harry the 2nd made it sound, “Yeah, he knew I was in love with Ophelia but he didn’t care. He moved in on her anyway, just to hurt me. And all he wanted was to fuck her.”
I looked around at one point and realized I was sitting in a fucking Roy Rogers being accused of philandering because of a flake and his three-year old vendetta.
I kept pressing Laura to tell me where the information came from, aware all along, and she finally admitted Harry the 2nd had imparted it to her after a recent rehearsal. I told her what he was up to. I told her how he was trying to make me look like a rotten bastard in a twisted act of revenge over something that happened years ago. But she was so damn proud of herself for catching me in what she saw as a lie that she sat there all smug and self-important, making me squirm on the hot seat until I began to feel that maybe I had done something wrong.
We left Roy Rogers, still arguing, and I drove her home where the argument continued into the evening. We parked at the Pathmark near her house and I tried to calm her down and dissuade her from her accusations but she was so sure of my deception that she wouldn’t back down.
Now I know that you’re sitting there about to ask me “What the hell is wrong with you?” right? Why didn’t I just tell her to fuck off? Why didn’t I walk away from the argument once I realized how pointless it was? I’ll tell you why. I was so needy and so afraid of being alone that there was no thought in my head of anything but total appeasement. I knew that I would have to spend the rest of the night apologizing if I didn’t want to lose her. And there is a part of me that is absolutely terrified of being alone. So I jumped in with both feet and groveled before her. Right up to the point where she revealed that she had actually been having dinner with Harry the 2nd when he triumphantly imparted to her my “indiscretion”. Then I blew a gasket. Here she was accusing me of holding secret crushes and she’s slipping around with someone she knows I can’t stand. I drove her home while yelling at her about how fucked up she is.
We didn’t talk for a couple of weeks, which was difficult because we were still bandmates. I told Harry the 2nd what I thought of his pathetic actions and he came at me with some nonsense about how I had “muscled in on him” and shown “no mercy” when I pursued his “one true love”. So I wasn’t talking to him, either. We had these rehearsals where nothing was said but song titles. Things in the band were tense, things in my love life were tense, things all over were tense.
I decided to take a vacation. I didn’t have much money so I decided to keep it cheap and drive to Chicago where I could stay with friends. I invited Laura because I thought it would be a good chance for us to work things out, come to some kind of conclusion about our relationship, that kind of crap. She said she couldn’t go, lack of funds, she didn’t want to sleep on someone’s couch, etc., etc. I wasn’t thrilled but I decided to go without her.
Some acquaintances of mine were moving to Chicago so I offered to help in exchange for meals and lodging on the way. I drove my own car and we made a convoy through Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana and into Illinois. Laura occupied my thoughts during every moment, whether I was driving, eating, sleeping, shitting, showering, shaving – whatever, she was there. No matter how I tried to relax my mind and enjoy the trip, she interrupted. Just outside of Michigan City, Indiana I hallucinated she was on the hood of my car, undressing while calling my name.
I think I made have misled you earlier when I told you that I groveled before Laura because I was needy and afraid of being alone. That’s not the whole truth. The truth is that I loved her. I loved her more than anyone I had ever known. She was the first woman I consider marrying, the first person I imagined having children with. She was, to me, the best woman I would ever know, the one who – despite all the problems we had – I hoped would be my companion for a long time.
This created a problem during my trip. Her presence overshadowed every aspect, no matter how mundane. When I wasn’t thinking of her I was thinking of our relationship and wondering how I would ever find the key to unlock the doors that had slammed shut between us. I agonized over what to do about Harry the 2nd, whether to leave the band or deliver an ultimatum – him or me – or find someone far more talented whom she couldn’t refuse: a eunuch or a homosexual or a woman or someone who wasn’t such a prick.
I tried to call her every day while I was traveling but kept getting her answering machine. I left many messages with the phone number of my hosts in Chicago but to no avail. I didn’t actually speak to her until the night before I was to leave and drive back. She sounded distracted. We had an insipid conversation, totally surface, nothing about what had gone on before we left, nothing about where we were at, nothing that would reassure me in any way. We ended the call and I said I’d see her when I got back. That phone call made my trip back worse than my trip out.
It’s fair to say that my obsession with her phantom and my constant ruminating over the state of things between us cast a pall over my vacation that successfully negated the very title.
When I got back to New Jersey I went to see her at her crummy little room in the crummy little house she shared with three other people in Weehawken. One of her Deadhead roommates told me she wasn’t in. I told him I would wait so he let me in and I climbed the stairs to her room. I knocked gently to make sure she wasn’t there (she hated when I just walked in unannounced) and swung the door open. The room was in its usual tossed state, clothes everywhere, everything piled on everything else in obvious disregard for gravity, one square foot on the single bed where you could actually sit down. So I sat down and began twiddling my thumbs, wondering when she’d be back. My gaze wandered over the room, eventually stopping on a very interesting little book on her nightstand: her diary.
I imagined at this point that you’d respond like an audience in a horror movie when the hero or heroine is headed into the house where the monster lurks. I imagined you’d warn me with shouts of “Don’t go in there!” and “Be careful!” but unlike the hero or heroine of a horror movie I was far from innocent. I knew what I was doing was wrong, but I justified it by reminding myself that my honey had done the very same thing when we had been involved a few months. She had read my diary and I knew because you know when someone’s been reading your diary. So I thought “tit for tat” and I picked it up and opened it to a recent entry.
It was about me (surprise, surprise, surprise) and it was not good. It was about how awful I was. About how she had no respect for me because I’m such a loser. It was page after page about how she needs to leave me, about how she just doesn’t know how to yet, about what a stupid fuck I am, about how I think I’m so smart but really I don’t know anything, about how I compare unfavorably to other boyfriends she’s had, about how I was holding her back, about how I kept her from realizing her full potential, about how her life would be so incredibly great if it wasn’t for me. I was devastated. No, “devastated” doesn’t really do it. I felt hollowed out. It was like someone had opened me up and scooped out my insides. Everything I believed was wrong. Everything I thought she felt about me was wrong. The entries, all the way back to the start of our relationship, were the worst things you could say about someone. The highest compliment she paid me was saying that she liked the fact that I spent money on her and she liked my friends.
I read on. I read all the way up to the final entry, which was written the day I finally got on her on the phone in Chicago. It explained her tone. She must have been calling from Harry the First’s house, the bass player no one could come near, because she wrote that she had slept with him at about the time she called me in Chicago. She wrote that the sex wasn’t as good as the old days they had spent as a couple in college, that it wasn’t like swimming, which was her way of saying that it didn’t “flow” or something like that.
I slammed the diary shut and realized I was crying. It was something I didn’t want to do. I thought about waiting until she showed up and strangling her to death but realized that would’ve been wrong. Then I thought of taking the diary but realized I didn’t want it near me. I walked around in tight circles and then I decided to leave. I got out of the house undetected and stumbled into the bright midday sun.
It was a fine August day and I drove home uneasily trying to contain myself so as not to have a wreck. I stopped off on the way home for a small bottle of bourbon and then I went to my room and played records and got stinko. I thought seriously about killing myself but then realized that if I couldn’t kill Laura why the hell should I kill myself. And I convinced myself that this woman - who only hours earlier had been at the center of my universe - was nothing but a piece of crap. Which, strangely enough, made us equal in her view.
There is an epilogue to this story. Two weeks went by during which I slammed the phone down on her every time she called. Then I weakened and took her call. She wept copiously and said she was “bereft” without me. She said she didn’t know if she wanted to live without me and then she apologized and told me that the diary didn’t mean anything, it was just her “crazy thoughts” and that I shouldn’t give it too much weight. I wanted to believe her so I believed her. I wanted to be with her again so we got together again. I mean, who wants to think such terrible things about one’s self?
The diary stayed in the back of my mind no matter how I tried to ignore it. We somehow got into couples’ counseling and Laura walked out halfway through the third session.
Right around New Year’s she dumped me.
Obligatory Throwback Pic
Circa 1979, Lindenhurst High Schoolstaging of "Out of the Frying Pan". I'm in the blue bathrobe, choking friend Jeff Maschi.
AERIAL VIEW: LIVE Friday (replays Tuesday) 6 pm ET on thehoundnyc,com. Available as a podcast Tuesdays, 7 pm, here. Old WFMU archives are on the Aerial View playlist page.JOB STORY: Job Story is no longer being produced. Previous episodes are on iTunes and SoundCloud. It also has its own email address.
